Going Xolo: Intel’s first x86 Medfield smartphone reviewed

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Finally, there’s the camera. Intel put a lot of work into the X900’s camera capabilities and it shows: the Camera application offers a full suite of options to equal those found on a decent point-and-click. The Xolo’s other claim to fame is its “Burst Mode;” the X900 can shoot up to 10 images at 15 frames per second. The burst mode impressed us when we saw the prototypes back in December; particularly when compared to other phones. With some devices, there’s a 1-2 second lag between mode selection and actual image capture, with 1-1.5 seconds in between each photo.

The X900 is a huge step forward in this regard. It doesn’t take pictures quite as quickly as the iPhone 4S, but both cameras are capable of capturing vehicles moving at moderate speed. Comparative image quality, it turns out, is a tougher nut for Intel to crack. The top image is the Xolo, the bottom is the iPhone 4S.

Unfortunately, the weather has been nasty for much of the past week (yes, that’s snow on the ground in late April). The image produced by the iPhone 4S is inarguably prettier, but it doesn’t actually capture what the world looked like. According to the iPhone, I snapped this image on a bright-but-overcast day at the end of a storm. The Xolo, on the other hand, paints the scene in dull, muted shades. It looks bleak and inhospitable, which makes sense — it was sleeting at the time and I was miserably wet.

Here’s another comparison, this time on a closer target.

The iPhone still paints the day in a vibrant palette that doesn’t reflect prevailing weather very well, but the Xolo’s version is too drab. Intel may have done a lot of work on the camera software, but whatever hardware Lava is using isn’t very good.

I don’t have an iPhone equivalent of the next photo; I snapped it at random while walking the dogs. In sunlight, the Xolo’s shortcomings are much less apparent. It’s acceptable, but not much more than that.

Under bright-but-overcast conditions, the Xolo falls down again.

The iPhone 4S doesn’t quite get the red of the barn, but the Xolo makes it look brown. Musings on the need to capture the true feeling of a moment aside, the Xolo X900’s camera has too many flaws to recommend it. It’s quick and responsive, nearly equaling the shutter speed of the iPhone 4S and offering a great deal more flexibility, but the quality of the images it produces kneecaps any claim to fame it might have made.

Battery life

One of the downsides to living in rural New York State is that 3G coverage is hard to come by. As a result, our talk-time tests were done on AT&T’s 2G network. One of the most common arguments against an x86 cell phone is the idea that it would draw too much power to be useful. In our tests, however, the Xolo actually beat the iPhone 4S, turning in 13 hours and 15 minutes of talk time against the iPhone 4’s 11 hours. WiFi was disabled on both devices.

While 3G talk times will undoubtedly be shorter, it’s the radio’s operational mode that makes the difference — not the CPU. This suggests that the Xolo X900 should be well matched against the iPhone 4S on a 3G network as well.

HD video playback isn’t quite so rosy. We encoded a number of television shows using the iPhone 4 preset in Handbrake 0.9.6, then looped them and measured how long it took the battery to die. Where the iPhone 4S manages a thoroughly respectable nine hours, Medfield struggles to reach a little more than half of that. This is a weak spot for the phone, particularly considering that Medfield and the iPhone 4S probably use the same hardware from Imagination Technologies (VXD 385 for decode, VXE 285 for encode).

Intel’s history of close collaboration with Imagination Technologies, combined with its own graphics research, suggest that this is a deficit the company will address in future product revisions. For now, however, the iPhone 4S has a clear advantage. The one bright spot to the HD battery life results is that 5 hours of video is enough to keep you distracted through everything but international flights.

Time to start the countdown

The X900 is a solid, well-built Android phone, period. The reason it’s not coming to North America isn’t because it can’t compete, but because (in my opinion) the US market is eternally fixated on flagship devices that often reign for weeks before being deposed by a new model with marginally better features and a catchy name. Medfield isn’t ready to take on the iPhone 4S, and carriers are going to be gun-shy until Intel has a device they believe could challenge Apple.

The major ARM developers like Samsung, Qualcomm, Nvidia, and Texas Instruments don’t have anything to worry about in 2012, but 2013 will be a different story. With the Xolo X900, Intel has officially put the ARM manufacturers on notice. Intel is going to power smartphones, and it’s going to be competitive in that space. For now, that means a handful of solid phones in foreign markets. 12-15 months from now, it’s going to mean design wins on US soil. The Xolo X900’s weak points are addressable. As a first-generation product, it’s downright impressive.

The ARM vendors who take Intel seriously will be the ones who survive. Anyone sitting back and pretending x86 is incapable of performing in this space probably won’t. Competing effectively with Intel in this space is going to take an unusual degree of collaboration between foundries and SoC designers, and it’s not going to happen overnight. We’ve talked before on how companies like Nvidia have been putting pressure on TSMC to improve collaboration and share risk; those are the sorts of changes that need to happen if ARM vendors want to keep their market share.

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